Erena Shingade recently completed an MA thesis on the Zen Buddhist poetry of Richard von Sturmer. Her writing has been published in journals including Landfall, Minarets, Mimicry, Atlanta Review, Brief and Ka Mate Ka Ora, and she is working towards her first poetry collection. Her research is concerned with the intersection of the poetic and the religious. Erena has composed and performed music for the poetry of Richard von Sturmer, Lyn Hejinian, Wallace Stevens and others, and has worked as a teaching assistant for the University of Auckland.

Poem notes

‘Credit Control,’ published in Atlanta Review, is reflective of my time working at Health Alliance, a government organisation that shares services across the district health boards. ‘Fast Moving Consumer Goods Therapy’ (published in Mimicry), ‘Love Poem #27’ and ‘The Poetics of Infinity Revisited’ (both forthcoming in Brief) explore flarf as a compositional technique and its attendant love for the preposterous. ‘Late at Night, River Voices and Mountain Forms’ and ‘Screensavers’ emerge from my studies of Zen Buddhist poetries, and ‘Celestial Maps of a Novice Mystic’ seeks the intersection between the poetic and cosmological.